SmartMove – was my experience an exception?

I had a highly satisfactory experience with SmartMove and I have written about it on this weblog several times, but I am receiving email that would indicate that other people are receiving totally different levels of customer service.

I have written to the people who were responsible for my great experience to ask them what is going on. My contacts were:

The reason I am following this up is that the mixed messages from SmartMove are extremely damaging to their brand image and should be corrected at once. I hope to have a response in the next few days. The speed and content of the response I get will tell me a lot about the future prospects of SmartMove.

One of the biggest disappointments for me is watching a company destroy its initial competitive advantage by poor execution and indifferent customer service. Creating a viable business model is difficult enough. Watching a company destroy an excellent working model through poor management is painful.

I hope that the SmartMove team has the will and the ability to sort things out quickly before negative customer experiences stall their momentum. Credibility is a fragile thing. Once you lose it, prospective customers will seek out other suppliers.

The same is true of bloggers… 🙂

If I recommend some company or individual and my readers cannot get the same service, I want to know why and will publicize what is happening so others will know exactly what is going on.

Company cultures have a finite life cycle, unfortunately, so it is important to have the latest data on what a company IS DOING NOW in order to make valid buying decisions. Past reputation may be a poor guide to what you can expect from a company today.

If other reader have used SmartMove, I would be interested in hearing of your experiences and learning who your particular contacts were. Let’s see if we can make sense of these differing results. Is it a company problem, or an individual problem?

0 Responses to SmartMove – was my experience an exception?

Thanks for pointing out our lack of accommodation for one of your readers. We simply at this time cannot service that area because of our working agreement with Overnite Transportation. I don’t offer that as an excuse but as acknowledgement of our inability to service all geographic locations.

As our growth continues we have as a goal to blanket the entire country. We are in 40 major metro locations now and when we expand to 90 by the years end or early 2007 we will be close to accomplishing this goal. We will have service to Blacksburg.

We are young and learning and trying to build a strong customer service reputation. If we drop the ball we can only learn from our mistakes. Thanks for holding our “feet to the fire”, we seriously appreciate it!

We stretched the limits of our agreement with Overnite Tranportation with David on his move. So we were out of our service area with his move and Overnite transportation will not let us do it again. That’s why when we pickup more cities we will be able to service more areas.